ENTER JOE ROTH

Life was very full at this point. California started to feel like home. With the money from the New York co-op and the movies, we bought the rental house in Beverly Hills Post Office. Henry and Sophie consumed our lives, driving them back and forth to each of their schools, play dates, sports teams. When Henry was five, I signed up to coach the T-ball team in the Beverly Hills Little League, loving teaching those little boys and girls the game and soaking in their innocence. (Throughout their childhoods, I coached all of my kids’ baseball and basketball teams.) The joy increased exponentially when our third child, Ella, was born. At her birth, we had a different doctor in a different hospital, but I felt the same awe when I got to pull her out by the shoulders and announce her arrival, “It’s a girl!”—which was the right call, because she was, in fact, a girl. (Two out of three ain’t bad.) I was only thirty-one and had a ton of energy, which was needed to put the time and focus into raising three very different kids, each with their own needs and at very different developmental stages. Laure had become the greatest mom, wife, and partner in the world, and kept our lives organized and our bellies full. And while the kids were young, we decided that instead of me leaving everyone at home when I got a movie out of town, everyone would come with me. When Laure was a teenager, her father was in the foreign service and was stationed in Spain, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Every time the family moved, Laure watched her mother find a house to live in, schools to attend, stores to shop at, and cultural experiences to learn from for the kids. Who knew that all of that would come into play in our lives, but she was built for this. Working on good films and bringing my family with me was my deepest dream come true.

Joe Roth is one of the most brilliant movie producers and executives ever to participate in show business—starting his own company, Morgan Creek, then running 20th Century Fox, then Disney, Revolution, and on and on. I didn’t even think about who had those executive positions at this point because my boss was always the director, and I didn’t need to please anyone but them. Morgan Creek was producing some of the best films around, but Joe decided to take a break from producing and to get behind the camera and direct a sweet little film called Coupe de Ville, another terrific coming-of-age story of three brothers on a road trip needing to readjust to life with the news that their father is dying. I really liked the script, and the part was a tough Air Force pilot, the oldest brother and disciplinarian, very different than any role I had ever gotten to play. Joe and I met, and he gave me the part. He had loved the coming-of-age movies I had been in, Breaking Away and Diner, and I think wanted to capture some of that feeling in this movie. We shot the film in Florida and South Carolina, and Laure packed us all up and moved us into houses and neighborhoods in both places, even finding summer camp for the kids. Not only did Joe and I hit it off right away, but Joe’s wife Donna and Laure became fast friends. They were in the same boat as us, with a newborn baby, finding housing, shooting the film, and we all became friends for life during that time. Joe was a really good director, very encouraging and focused on the nuances of each character. He had a clear vision of the film but was also open to letting the actors own their characters and improvise. Maybe a little too open.

It was a comedy, but the storylines were filled with conflict, which the cast was more than capable of creating. It was an intimidating joy to do scenes with the hyper-talented Alan Arkin. He played my father, and watching the subtlety he brought to everything he did was like getting a masterclass acting lesson in real time, forcing me to find the simplest truth in each and every beat of a scene. And off camera, his humility as a person and an artist were life lessons in themselves. My younger brother was played by Arye Gross, the actor who had temporarily replaced me on The Wonder Years. Arye and I became fast friends, had a great time doing our scenes together, and really bonded over dealing with the actor who played our youngest brother, Patrick Dempsey. Patrick was an up-and-coming young star, handsome and funny. He had done a couple of teen comedies, but he acted like he was a major movie star. He was probably around twenty-three, and he had recently married his acting coach/manager/guru, Rocky, who was about twenty-five years older than him, and the two of them set out to undermine the director and take over the film. I have worked with arrogant actors, but I have never seen anything like this. Rocky would be on the set, and after we did a take, instead of coming over with the rest of us to talk to the director about adjustments he might like to make in the scene, Patrick would beeline to Rocky, who would whisper her notes to him. It was incredibly disrespectful, but Joe didn’t want to cause a problem with one of his lead actors, so he tried to manage the situation rather than confront it. Rocky’s notes to Patrick seemed to be all about how to draw attention to himself at every moment of every scene, even if that meant not doing the dialogue, taking other people’s lines, doing extraneous physical business to distract, and whatever else the two of them came up with in their fucking little confabs. I got tired of that shit real fast and told him so. He said his character was a clownish person and he was just playing it to push my character’s buttons, which would be fine if that was what the director asked us to do. But this had nothing to do with the collaboration that needs to take place on a film set and everything to do with ambition and self-aggrandizement.

I finally lost my shit one day. The movie is called Coupe de Ville because the three brothers are driving their father’s prized car across the country so he can have it back before he dies, and my character is the one who does all the driving. The picture car was a beautiful and rare car and, both as the character and the actor driving it, I had to take really good care of it. We were shooting a scene of us driving down the highway, talking about something or other, and Patrick was riding shotgun. In one of the stupidest improvisational moments in film history, Patrick slides over to me, pins my foot down on the gas pedal, and tries to wrestle control of the steering wheel from me. The camera crew was driving right beside us, filming from an open truck, and this putz risked crashing into them, running us all off the road, and killing people. I slammed my elbow into him to get him off of me and he finally slid back to his side of the bench seat. I pulled the car over, went around the car, and pulled him out. I think he scared himself, or at least knew he had crossed a line, but still tried to laugh it off as just “improv.” The crew pulled us apart before a real fight began, but I made it clear I wasn’t going to play that way anymore. From then on, Joe took more control of things, Rocky was not allowed on the set, and Patrick got moved to the back seat. Assholes.

Joe and I really bonded over it all. When we got back to LA, our families were still seeing each other regularly. He knew that I was interested in directing, and when he decided to shoot an additional scene to open the movie, which had younger actors playing the three brothers, he asked me to come to the shoot and help him direct the child actors, since I had experience doing that from The Wonder Years. I offered absolutely no help whatsoever, but it was flattering to be respected in that way. And this was just the beginning of the influence Joe had on my career and my life. Joe was not only editing the film, but secretly negotiating to leave his own company and take the job of running 20th Century Fox. Only a couple of months later, I was in Chicago shooting a film, and Joe had taken the reins at Fox. He called me up one day with very exciting news: “Hey, I just bought your movie.” That movie was Home Alone.